It’s been a busy summer, and so I’ve not really looked at my needles very much. Yesterday, I didn’t have much to do, so I thought I’d get myself back into the routine. I decided to grab a ball of yarn that’s been sitting in my basket for nearly 18 months and turn it into something pretty and useful. The nights are closing in, slowly but surely, and it won’t be long before everyone’ll be wanting something chic and unique to put round their necks.

Unfortunately, this ball of yarn was not really large enough …

So, it goes round my neck about one and a half times. It can be fastened with a brooch I suppose, although I’ll probably add a button or two and wear it that way. Otherwise, I like this yarn! Just wish I had a bit more of it (I’m not even sure where it came from…)

I’m going to make a few more scarves to get back into a good rhythm. If anyone has a nice pattern with interesting stitching, I’d like very much for you to share it in the comments below!

Luke is one of my favourite comic artists. I love his sparse use of a specific colour stock, and how he captures so much emotion in so few pen-strokes. His series about Hilda, an unconventional young girl, is absolutely joyous. The books are published on Nobrow so please look out for them.

Too preoccupied with day-to-day hardships like having to get up and wash myself and eat and work and things, more often than not I only deal with questions of gender equality as and when they come up, on the fly.

I must give myself credit, though – in my job, they do come up fairly frequently. and I do make an effort to challenge discriminatory behaviour whenever I witness it; whether it’s calling out a kid using the word ‘gay’ to mean ‘rubbish’, or – more often – a colleague using sexist language.

It’s only a small effort, and I wish I could do more. The truth is, the environment I’ve been working in for the last 10 months is shockingly sexist. It’s at an independent boarding school – formerly a boys’ school but co-educational for long enough to make the archaic attitudes of some to be truly stomach-clenching. As is still a trend across the education system, the number of female teachers outnumbers that of male teachers, and yet all but one of the senior leadership team is male. I don’t mean to imply that I think competent women have been passed over for those jobs – I’m well aware of the other factors that lead to this kind of imbalance. Women tending to take time off or go part time in order to raise children, women lacking the confidence in their own ability and not putting themselves forward for promotion, men feeling pressure to earn more money to support their families when their wives take time off to raise children.

I’m not saying I think any of these tendencies are RIGHT, what I’m saying is that they HAPPEN. They are part of the invisible expectations that most of us simply take for granted when they are presented to us as being the NORM in our patriarchal society.

Boys outnumber girls quite considerably at this school – roughly 3:2 (I’m talking cisgender here, although there’s one openly trans girl that I know of. She’s a day pupil. I’m not sure the boarding system would show much inclination to accommodate her needs, should she wish to stay a night). The institutional sexism I’ve observed begins in the uniform policy. Girls MUST wear a skirt and boys MUST wear trousers. Girls MAY wear one set of earrings and MAY wear their hair long, provided it is tied back. Boys MUST NOT wear an earring and MUST keep their hair cut short. I’m not sure who will be harmed if boys wear earrings and have long hair, although there has of course been a terrible decline in society since such things became acceptable in wider society that I’m sure the school has ample justification. Dogs and cats living together, MASS HYSTERIA.

Anyway, I don’t want to get too deep into that just here. I will just mention, however, that I don’t think it helps that the SLT is so disproportionately male. I think that’s silent reinforcement of the INCORRECT idea that men are more suited to senior roles than women are, and that it’s seriously problematic to have that kind of reinforcement of a negative idea in a coeducational facility. We’re supposed to be encouraging young people to succeed, while silently demonstrating that the contents of your underwear matter more than your GCSE results…

Last night, I was on duty in a girls’ boarding house. Normally on a Friday, the girls choose a film to watch instead of doing homework, and I sit in the office pretending to work (but really refreshing Twitter every fifteen seconds and feeling glum that all my friends are doing interesting things on a Friday night instead of supervising 30 surly teenagers), but last night I thought it would be nice to show them a classic film: The Breakfast Club. This American Life posted a podcast last week which contained an interview with Molly Ringwald about watching the film with her ten-year-old daughter for the first time. It’s a moving episode and I recommend it to anyone who has ever enjoyed the film.

If you don’t know the film, watch it now. It’s a day in the lives of five teenagers in detention on a Saturday. They are set the task of writing a paper about ‘who they are’, and over the course of the day this is what we find out. We learn the reason why they are in detention, and about the pressures and strains each of them experiences. There’s a jock, a nerd, a weirdo, a prom queen, and a criminal. In the simplest terms. But since when did life obey the simplest terms?

What makes the film wonderful is how unique and yet how similar each of the (white, straight, cisgender, more-or-less privileged – as I said to the girls, it’s nearly 30 years old so bear that in mind when there’s the odd bit of homophobia) kids really are. They all have strengths and flaws. They all have parts of their life that are ‘dissatisfying’ (to a greater or lesser extent). They all experience pressure from someone or another. They all deal with challenges every day and sometimes they fuck up. And none of them has a straightforward relationship with their parents.

So, watching the film with a bunch of teenage girls was pretty interesting. They interpreted it in a different way to me, which I guess is natural … However, I was a bit dismayed by the predominant response. Almost all the girls spent the 100-odd minutes drooling over John (with the exception of one, who preferred Brian), and were unanimous in their opinion of Alison (“why does she have to be so weird!”). However, most of their antagonism was aimed at the “princess” character, Claire (“oh em gee she’s such a bee”).

Now, considering the demographic of the girls watching the film, I thought this was pretty disheartening, to tell you the truth. Sure, Claire has flaws, and she is pretty self-centred: “I’m so popular …”

BUT, the way she behaves has a lot to do with her situation and the pressures that are put on her (in her case, by her friends). Compared with John, whose rape joke really makes me wince, or Andrew, who admits to mindlessly bullying another student, how does she come off the worst? And is she really any more conceited than Brian, who thinks he’s a better person than Claire but is pretty dismissive of the kind of kids who take shop?

As far as I’m concerned, the kids are just kids, dealing with stuff, making mistakes, learning from them, moving on. All of them do or say something utterly shitty, and all of them do or say something totally compassionate. So yeah, I was pretty dismayed when the girls I watched the film with were much more critical of the female characters than they were the male characters. It kind of made me think that their background is less forgiving of flaws in women than it is of flaws in men.

Or maybe it’s a good thing that they have high standards. I dunno. I’m gonna stop thinking about it now and make some tea.

Oh yeah, speaking of breakfast, Teleman’s album is finally out so join the Breakfast club yourself by getting a copy:

As we all know, throwing stuff away is for losers and upcycling is totally rad.

5 years ago, some friends all clubbed in to get me a set of headphones for my birthday. They sounded really great – in fact, they were the best sounding headphones I’d ever had. They’ve now been discontinued by Sony though and I’m not surprised, firstly because they clamped my head like a vice and caused headaches if I used them for more than an hour, and secondly because 3 years ago, the left-hand earcup just snapped off at the joint, rendering them unusable.

To replace them, I bought a cheap and excellent set of Sennheisers which I’ve been using happily for the last 3 years.

Anyway, these broken Sony MDR-V500s have been gathering dust on a shelf for three years, and during a PMT-induced bout of insomnia the other night I found myself pondering what to do with them. They still reproduce sound extremely well, but the location of the break – and the nature of the snug fit of the headphones – meant that gluing, taping, or otherwise re-affixing the cup would be a short-term fix and largely pointless. So I thought about trying to fix them into a headband or similar headgear. With this solution in mind, today I found a tiny screwdriver and dismantled the remaining part of the headphones. Here they are looking like a depressed Moomintroll.

The next step in my upcycling master plan is to knit a beanie with interior pockets into which I can slip these earcups, that I can then use to play bangin choonz while looking uber-stylish all next winter, oh yeah. I guess I could also attach pockets to a sunhat too, then I can do the same all summer as well. The world is my upcycling oyster of amazingness. Here are some artist’s impressions mockups of how fab such hats will be:

There’s really no reason to write this post because the title kind of says it all.

I’ve had a couple of weeks off and it’s been fantastic. I’ve caught up with a bunch of people that I love and met some new great people and helped do some fundraising and cooked loads of vegan food and fixed up my rusty old bike and seen some ospreys and crossbills and LBJs and danced to lots of brilliant music (well, sorta swayed from side to side a bit). I feel pretty ethically recharged, which I really needed after spending the previous week boiling in a state of rage and unable to escape the awful comments and opinions of someone who is stuck in the 19th century. Have you heard about the mutant mosquitoes that interbreed with regular mosquitoes, but then a genetic time-bomb inside them kills the offspring before they can breed (NB I only half-listened to this podcast while baking)? Well, I’m not sure about the implications of that but if there were any way of introducing the same mutation to UKIP voters? You know, to save the future? Maybe it could be transferred through the ink used in the Daily Mail…?

Anyway, as there’s nothing much I can do about the awfulness, I decided to just bury myself in things that I love. Last Friday I went to a Coen Brothers Tribute Night in Bristol, where a variety of artists performed their own take on music from Coen Brothers films. It was a great night. I particularly enjoyed Thomas Truax and Kirsty McGee, but that cuddly Hebridean numpty The Pictish Trail will always be my fave ❤

So lots of late nights and beer and dashing about have had two results: my bank account is empty and I’ve caught a cold. So yesterday I had no choice but to stay inside under blankets, knitting, drinking tea, and watching Coen Brothers movies. So here is a fascinating blog about tea for your intense reading pleasure.

O Brother Where Art Thou

It’s ages since I saw this film. Such a classic. Dramatic, hilarious, and uplifting. And it’s based loosely on the Odyssey so that gives me a vague segue into the tea I chose to accompany the movie …

Tea number one is the wonderfully named ‘Magic Tea of the Druids’. I picked this up in Cardiff market last weekend. It’s a refreshing mix of green and black tea but I’m not awfully sold on the artificial strawberry and vanilla flavouring, which makes it smell like Nesquik. HOWEVER it does also include mistletoe so it’s OBVIOUSLY the magic potion from Asterix. It’s refreshing, but not something I can drink regularly.

The Hudsucker Proxy

Not awfully fond of this one, to be honest, although I can’t be entirely sure why. It has some great gags and the boardroom really reminds me of Monty Python, but some of the characterisation makes me wince. Wise ol’ Moses, the omniscient clockwork mechanic? The hard-nosed woman journalist with the gaping man-shaped hole in her life? You say the application of cliché only serves to deepen the satire, I say ‘yeesh’.

Nothing stock about this tea though. A present from a friend, it’s a Rooibos chai flavoured predominantly with fennel and also containing other herbs and spices that are in German so I can’t understand them. Plenty of fennel in it though, hot delicious fennel. I have a bunch of other teas containing fennel; this is probably the fenneliest. Including the fennel tea. Yeah. Maybe a little too much fennel in this. Can’t really taste the Rooibos. But I love fennel so the tea is a success.

Intolerable Cruelty

Oh, I really love this film, mostly because it fits in with the part of my life that I need to be shown that wealthy people have a big spiritual void in their life. Yeah, you can kind of see what’s coming, but THAT INTRO, and Billy Bob Thornton’s part is great, and it’s neat how the story comes together (as are all the Coen Brothers’ films – nothing is superfluous). Also it reminds me of Heartbreakers which I loved when I was 17.

A zing with a sting (hey Twinings you can have that one for free), just like the fast- and sharp- talking characters in the film. ‘Energising’ peppermint and nettle. Yeah whatever, it’s good for digestion and it tastes great. I wanted to try this for ages, and it took some finding. What I mean is, they didn’t sell in in Co-op so I had to go to Sainsbury’s. But it was worth it.

The Ladykillers

I’d missed this one when it came out, but I liked it. Not as much as the original Ealing comedy, but it was an interesting re-imagining. Mostly I liked the reference to one of the greatest songs ever recorded:

And I accompanied this with a cup of Lady Grey, which was the wrong choice really as it was already quite late so I should have had something without caffeine.

I’m sure that the above description of films and tea have completely blown your mind, now just to keep in with what’s supposed to be the theme of this blog, here’s a picture of the cushion-cover-that-was-originally-supposed-to-be-a-hat that I finished while watching films and drinking tea (yes I am basically terrible at achieving my stated aims).

Yesterday I did something that I haven’t done in a little while, which is lie to a friend to get out of a social engagement that I wanted to go to and had been genuinely invited to, because I’d been hanging out him and his lovely friends for a couple of hours already and I thought they’d probably have had enough of me. Gaahhhhh, stupid brain. Going to try to explain it away by saying that I was exhausted after another crappy week at work and that they were going to roast a duck and I don’t eat meat. But whatever.

I think generally my self esteem is improving, but for the last four weeks it’s been a bit up and down and I’m going to blame work being crazy and not having any free time to just kick back on my own and read or knit or listen to records or whatever. So many good records out in the last couple of months, like My Sad Captains and Angel Olsen and Eagulls and Cheatahs and Withered Hand and Future Islands, and I’ve been putting in so many extra hours that every morning I’m lying in bed hitting snooze four or five times thinking ‘I could just phone in sick and lie here playing records all day’. Steal back some time. I won’t do that though because it’ll make me feel worse afterwards. At any rate, I’m taking today off, even though there’s stuff I need to do. Got to be a bit kind to myself, because if I can put in 60+ hours in the week and still not get everything done then surely that means it’s too much work for one person, right?

Actually, a number of people at work have told me I’m doing a good job, and a couple have said I’m doing too much and I need to slow down. I find it’s so much easier to ignore positive remarks than criticism, though; a sentiment succinctly summed up in this lovely cartoon (originally posted here)

Today I’ve been taking it easy. Baking, playing records, even knitting a little bit, yay. It’s going very very slowly, and where I’ve had a break for several weeks, the tension has gone a bit ropey and some parts have snagged a bit, but it’s looking ok. Here’s an eyeful:

And speaking of Future Islands (mentioned them a couple of paragraphs ago, weren’t you paying attention?), it makes me so glad that a band I’ve loved for years, who are unique and moving and extremely hardworking, are finally getting a bit of exposure over their 4th album! I hope all the people commenting on this youtube clip are going back and buying their other albums (to be fair they are all pretty similar).

*insert obligatory introductory sentence here making empty promises to do more knitting and talk about that some time*

I’ve got a nice little A level class. They’re the best. There’s only 2 kids and they’re both going to get excellent grades so it’s a nice, easy-going, low-pressure highlight of my week when I see them.

We’re about to study issues around the topic of young people’s relationships, bullying, peer pressure, and that kind of thing, so we had a little bit of a discussion today, and I thought their answers were interesting, so I’m going to share them.

The boy answered, “No, because my parents worked abroad a lot so I was on my own with the maid or private tutors.”

I thought that was interesting. Neither of them wanted to go into the philosophical question of ‘what is happiness ….?’

I always think I was a happy child. My parents were (are) very loving and attentive. We had the best holidays. I got on well at school, I played a lot with my brothers and friends, or I was happy on my own with books and games. Sometimes though I remember certain things and wonder if they were early signs of inner turmoil … Such as frequent nightmares, the odd sleep paralysis episode, and how I never quite got around to phoning my primary school friends when I went to a different secondary school to them … Too late now I guess. Oh well. I’m gonna stop introspecting and go and do some work.